INNUMERABLE READERS have asked me why stock in Amalgamated Galosh Co. has held steady at 63 3/8 despite the indictment of its CEO for felonious coreoption and its second quarter loss of $113.6 million, due to the sale of only two pair of its fashionable, if somewhat impractical, open-toed galoshes.

I might never have divined the answer had I not stumbled on Dr. Homer T. Pettibone, D.V.M., director of the Federal Surplus Commodities Program. He was furtively opening the door of a towering silo in a barren field near Casablanca, Kan. "What do you have in there?" I demanded. "Another million bushels of surplus wheat? A couple of zillion slices of surplus Gorgonzola?"

"Surplus agricultural products are a dime a dozen," he said indignantly. "What do you take us for, bureaucratic bunglers?" He looked both ways and then opened the door. "Take a gander at these," he said.

The silo was stuffed to the ceiling with gilt-edged, ornately printed pieces of paper. "Stock in Amalgamated Galosh," he said proudly.

"You bought all these shares in that loser?" I asked incredulously.

"Not so loud," he said nervously. "This is our secret pilot project to keep stock prices high. We figure if it works with Amalgamated, it'll work with any company on the market."

"You mean it's like your surplus wheat and surplus cheese programs?"

"Exactly," said Dr. Pettibone. "When farmers produced too much wheat or cheese, we bought up the surplus to artificially maintain high prices. And what's more surplus these days than stocks?"

"They didn't take kindly to that suggestion," he agreed. "But this pilot project shows how we can easily prevent a disastrous stock market crash by simply purchasing surplus stocks no one wants to buy and storing them in our silos."

"That's unprecedented," I said.

"No, in 1929 the top financiers attempted the same strategy," he said. "Unfortunately they failed, but they didn't have the U.S. Treasury behind them. We're supremely confident that with a trillion dollars or so we'll be able to achieve our goal -- which is, of course, to maintain an atmosphere of irrational exuberance."

"That's all well and good," I conceded, "but what are you going to do with all these stock certificates?"

Dr. Pettibone looked surprised. "Why, what we always do with surplus commodities," he said. "Some we donate to the school lunch program, and the rest we ship to the starving people of Mbonga."

"And what do they do with them?"

"Well, the schoolchildren find them ideal for making paper airplanes," he said. "As for the Mbongans, they eat them."

I shook my head. "Really, Pettibone," I said, "all that just goes to show that you've spent millions of the taxpayers' dollars buying up and storing pieces of paper that aren't good for a darned thing."

"Keep that to yourself," whispered Pettibone fearfully. "If people realize that stocks are intrinsically worthless, there goes the nation's irrational exuberance."